"About half a year ago I was looking around me and seeing stagnation in the GNOME community. I was concerned that GNOME had lost its momentum and that we were just making boring incremental releases that added very little new functionality. I think I was very wrong. I'd like to take this time to list some things that are happening right now in the GNOME community that have me very excited. These are the projects that are actively improving the future of the GNOME desktop." Let's hope a punctuation checker will be part of GNOME too. One Aaron is enough.
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Member since:2007-07-20
because when you start a project you dont want to be locked into 1 platform - even if that project starts out being platform specific. - gimp/gaim etc.
If employed as a gnome developer, then the most important thing is that your skills are applicable to gnome. besides, Im sure what you learn in vala applies to other languages also.
Lots of developers contribute free time to opensource projects. of course we could always do with more.
http://www.ohloh.net/kudo_ranks
Edited 2007-08-07 22:17
Member since:2005-11-11
"Ok, but why would you want to use Vala outside of Gnome? There are a lot of languages that are more widely supported by development tools and more mature. "
Who cares? That's like asking why you would want to use Ruby on Rails outside of web development.
Look, people on Slashdot and OSNews are constantly complaining that Mono is evil and should die. Developers choose Mono/C# because it's easier and faster (easier syntax, no manual memory management, etc) than C. Now, Vala can provide all those advantages without depending on Mono, and all people here can do is complaining?
Geez.
"Just because you don't care about how applicable your skills are doesn't mean no-one does. Sure, for some people it won't matter that Vala is not going to help them get a job, but you're putting another obstacle in the way of those who do."
It might not help them get a job, but it can help them get a job done.
Sun didn't develop Java to allow more people to be employed. Microsoft didn't develop Windows to allow more people to be employed.
Just what is your problem? If you are only looking for skills to have a better chance of being employed, then by all means, don't learn Vala! Nobody is forcing you to! But you have absolutely no right deny other people the right to develop and/or learn Vala.
"and inventing new languages to add to the learning curve is not the way to encourage them."
Vala seems to be syntactically almost exactly the same as C#, which is already similar to Java. The "learning curve" you speak of is almost nonexistent. It even looks like learning Vala is a lot easier than learning C.
Member since:
2005-09-21
* when I installed KDE from jhbuild I think it was, it installed its own glib.
Ok, but why would you want to use Vala outside of Gnome? There are a lot of languages that are more widely supported by development tools and more mature.
Just because you don't care about how applicable your skills are doesn't mean no-one does. Sure, for some people it won't matter that Vala is not going to help them get a job, but you're putting another obstacle in the way of those who do. If I'm working on open source, I would rather work on something that will give me marketable skills. There are not that many developers willing to contribute their free time to open source projects to start with, and inventing new languages to add to the learning curve is not the way to encourage them.
Perhaps. And look how that turned out. Support for Objective C in tools outside of MacOS is practically nonexistant, even though MacOS is a bigger platform than Linux+Gnome.